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Im a designer that has spent a lot of time working within identity and print work for the last few years.

I want to get up to speed on great tools & languages in front end dev. I see all these names like SASS, LESS, Flexbox, Ruby, Ajax etc... But what should someone who has had their head out of the game for a few years be concentrating on?

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Designing websites will come from experience and making mistakes. As will development, but development sometimes you need a few more pointers.

The amount of tooling in modern web development has reached an all time high, and I don't see that going away anytime soon. It's important, but I wouldn't focus on learning the tools (SASS, LESS, etc.). That knowledge will come from you wanting to build something. You'll find a thing, say "hey that could help me!" and then you'll have learned that thing.

You do not need tools to make great websites. That said, they help. They have their place, and you'll learn that along the way.

Focus on building something you want to build. If that's a blog, build a blog. If that's a simple app to start with, learn what MVC means and try a few things. If you want to build your own portfolio and make some interesting interactions, you might pick up jQuery or an HTML canvas framework. You will pick up the necessary skill sets along the way.

I think the best way to learn any of these things is to try to do something you don't already know how to do, and then figure it out.

This will give you both an understanding of the language and programming in general.

2.Learn Ruby the hard way . This will give you a handle on a completely different language. It's also geared towards complete novices so it makes sense even if you're not a seasoned programmer.

3. Learn HTML/CSS. Going through the two previous courses you will have definitely come across various forms of markup. They may have told you that you need to know HTML/CSS in order todo them but I've found that it's just not true. They give you all the markup you need and you'll be better waiting to learn this stuff.

So far you've not done anything with visual design. This is the step in which you start to make things on the screen look the way you want. My biggest recommendation is to not take a course, but to go through bootstrap and tear apart everything you see. Notice a button that has round corners? Inspect that element and see the CSS that's making that happen. A good course to take before doing any of step 3 is learning your dev tools from codeschool.

4. Now that you've learned your dev tools, have torn apart bootstrap and have a handle on how CSS renders things differently on the screen you can start looking into Sass. I would recommend only looking at Sass as Less is pretty much dead. The best way to learn Sass imo is by just reading the docs.

5. Ok so now what? You've got a handle on JavaScript, a bit of Ruby, HTML/CSS, and Sass. This has taken you maybe 500 hours. You can make basic websites. Perhaps even a sinatra app . This is where you'll understand that everything you just learned is old, outdated and wrong. Web development, especially front-end web development moves at a remarkable (and annoying) speed.

You'll be told that Sass is old and that you should be using Post CSS instead. You'll start learning Angular and then someone will tell you that you're doing it wrong because MVC is broken and Flux is the best way to build scalable front-end apps. You'll figure out how to deploy and app on Heroku and then someone will point out that running dokku on digital ocean is cheaper.

I used Code Academy to freshen up my skills with HTML & CSS and to also learn Javascript, plus it's free! SASS & LESS are very similar, choose either one to learn. Bootstrap Is a great front-end framework to use and is highly responsive & powerful.

I have to respectfully disagree with this. These are terrible starting points in my opinion.

What good is a developer who knows how to scaffold a project, compile CSS, and setup a Grunt file if that developer doesn't even know how to center a div. Or run an AJAX call? or properly name-space their javascript? Or understand what data-binding is?

Those are tools to get you up and running quickly, they won't get a project built.

JavaScript. Since that is the "language of the web" you should learn it. Start with XMLhttprequest (or AJAX if you are using jQuery) so you can tap into APIs everywhere. That will make you very powerful. Then jump into CSS. Then SASS. Then Gulp. Then maybe an object oriented framework like Angular, Backbone. Some interesting thing going on with React.

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I guess it really depends on what your goals are. I would personally recommend to get your head around Sketch. Sketch is arguably the best application for user interface design. I started using it around a year ago and have never looked back. In terms of code, javascript is all you really need. I'm not going to go in too much detail but I would strongly recommend learning Meteor. It's pretty easy to pick up and allows you to build cross platform apps in lights speed since it can run on both, server and client side. You might want to look at React too. It's pretty powerful and loaded with interface components. It basically eliminates all of the hard work. Good luck!

Sorry I probably wasn't specific enough, I guess I'm looking at taking my knowledge from just your standard HTML & CSS, I can imagine there are lots of new languages that would make my life easier by learning.

I second this point, if you can learn Javascript/Jquery then you can progress to more advanced concepts. That being more backend technologies most notably Node.js. I went from building out all client applications in a standard Mamp stacks, read up about Node and have never looked back. The MEAN stack is just a joy to programme in.